Graph Shows When the U.S. Healthcare System Went off the Rails

Nixon's Healthcare Maintenance Organization Act of 1973 played an early role in enabling corporations to profit off sick and dying Americans

Jon Ponder
Chart source: Our World in Data

This graph shows the point at which the efficacy of healthcare in the United States diverged from the systems of its peer and competitor countries like the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, France and Japan. It shows that at the point when healthcare spending skyrocketed in the United States, the results of the enormous spending began to falter as measured by life expectancy.

Obviously, there were many factors that led to this divergence. But one factor in particular stands out. In 1973, President Nixon pushed through Congress and then signed into law the Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973, which changed the operating parameters of HMOs and other pre-paid medical plans. Its advocate was Edgar Kaiser, a wealthy California donor and president of Kaiser Permanente.

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Oxford’s Word of the Year Is ‘Brain Rot’

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Pensito AI-Assisted Illustration

Who are we to quibble with something with “Oxford” in its name that “brain rot” is two words, not one?

From TIME:

If you’ve been scrolling too long on social media, you might be suffering from “brain rot,” the word of 2024, per the publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary.

After public consultation, Oxford University Press announced its choice—defined as the “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging” as well as “something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration”—on Monday. “Brain rot” beat out five other finalists, including “dynamic pricing,” “lore,” “romantasy,” “slop,” and Dictionary.com’s Word of the Year “demure.”

“‘Brain rot’ speaks to one of the perceived dangers of virtual life, and how we are using our free time,” Casper Grathwohl, president of Oxford Languages, said in the announcement. “It feels like a rightful next chapter in the cultural conversation about humanity and technology. It’s not surprising that so many voters embraced the term, endorsing it as our choice this year.”

The first recorded use of “brain rot,” according to Oxford University Press, was in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, published in 1854. “While England endeavours to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?” wrote Thoreau in his treatise on transcendentalism.

It would seem the results of the 2024 presidential election are symptomatic of a virtual pandemic of brain rot across the electorate. Just pour some bleach on it.

MAGA Christians Set Their Sights on the Revoking 19th Amendment, Women’s Right to Vote

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Women demanding the right to vote in 1920

Ms. Magazine:“If we had a Christian nation tomorrow, and women did have the right to vote, we would not have a Christian nation within 50 years because the husband has been appointed by God as the head of his home.” – MAGA Pastor Joel Webbon, president of the Right Response Ministries, in 2023

In a 2024 episode of his own podcast Theology Applied, [MAGA theologist Joel] Webbon argued that the repeal of the 19th Amendment is actually “not [about] trying to take away the female vote, but it’s trying to say, no, there’s a family vote,” and that he believes this because “that is the Christian position.”

In fact, more than a hundred years earlier, a member of the Christian Reformed Church used the same argument that the Bible opposes suffrage, and taught that society consists of families, not individuals.

On the same episode of The Standard, Webbon uses the same argument that late 19th- and 20th-century anti-suffragists used: that women’s right to vote is a moral issue in that it impinges on men’s rights and interferes with women’s predestined roles as wife and mother.

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Defense Secretary Nominee’s Mother Criticized Him As a Serial Abuser of Women

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Hegseth showing off his radical Christian nationalist tattoos

Daily Beast: “On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say… get some help and take an honest look at yourself,” [Penelope Hegseth, the Trump nominee’s mother] wrote on April 30, 2018.

“I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego.

“You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.”

Federal Debt Could Spike Trump’s Big Economic Promises

Buck Banks

Trumponomics Watch

The Associated Press: Donald Trump has big plans for the economy — and a big debt problem that will be a hurdle to delivering on them.

Trump has bold ideas on tax cuts, tariffs and other programs, but high interest rates and the price of repaying the federal government’s existing debt could limit what he’s able to do.

Not only is the federal debt at roughly $36 trillion, but the spike in inflation after the coronavirus pandemic has pushed up the government’s borrowing costs such that debt service next year will easily exceed spending on national security.

The higher cost of servicing the debt gives Trump less room to maneuver with the federal budget as he seeks income tax cuts. It’s also a political challenge because higher interest rates have made it costlier for many Americans to buy a home or new automobile. And the issue of high costs helped Trump reclaim the presidency in November’s election.

“It’s clear the current amount of debt is putting upward pressure on interest rates, including mortgage rates for instance,” said Shai Akabas, executive director of the economic policy program at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “The cost of housing and groceries is going to be increasingly felt by households in a way that are going to adversely affect our economic prospects in the future.”

After Running against High Prices, Trump Warns Americans That He’ll Raise Prices Across the Board

The chaos is the point

Jon Ponder

In Shock Doctrine, her seminal work on the rise of authoritarnism in the contemporary world, Naomi Klein shows how fascists undermine democracies in order to replace them with authoritarian states by creating and exploiting economic chaos. In the disruptions that ensue, they seize power.

In advance of his inauguration next month, Trump is saying plainly that he is very intentionally bringing economic chaos on day one. As Maya Angelou said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. People know themselves much better than you do.”

Salon.com: Donald Trump, who won in part due to inflation that peaked two years ago, campaigned on a policy of making everything from vegetables to televisions more expensive, suggesting a plurality of voters either did not understand tariffs — and the rippling economic impact of raising taxes on imported goods — or simply did not believe the Republican candidate would follow through.

In a Monday evening post on Truth Social, the president-elect reaffirmed that yeah, he’s serious.

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Trumponomics Watch: Tax Cuts for the Rich Covered by Cuts to Medicaid, Food Stamps

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“President-elect Donald Trump’s economic advisers and congressional Republicans have begun preliminary discussions about making significant changes to Medicaid, food stamps and other federal safety net programs to offset the enormous cost of extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts next year,” the Washington Post reports.

“Among the options under discussion by GOP lawmakers and aides are new work requirements and spending caps for the programs.”

“However, concern is high among some Republicans about the political downsides of such cuts, which would affect programs that provide support for at least 70 million low-income Americans, and some people familiar with the talks stressed that discussions are preliminary.”

Fascism Experty Timothy Snyder: Trump’s Cabinet of Deplorables Is Designed to ‘Destroy Our Country’

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Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny: It is a mistake to think of [Trump’s cabinet nominees] as flawed. It is not they will do a bad job in their assigned posts. It is that they will do a good job using those assigned posts to destroy our country.

However and by whomever this was organized, the intention of these appointments is clear: to create American horror. Elected officials should see this for what it is. Senators, regardless of party, should understand that the United States Senate will not outlast the United States, insist on voting, and vote accordingly. The Supreme Court of the United States will likely be called upon. Although it is a faint hope, one must venture it anyway: that its justices will understand that the Constitution was not in fact written as the cover story for state destruction. The Supreme Court will also not outlast the United States.

And citizens, regardless of how they voted, need now to check their attitudes. This is no longer a post-electoral moment. It is a pre-catastrophic moment. Trump voters are caught in the notion that Trump must be doing the right thing if Harris voters are upset. But Harris voters are upset now because they love their country. And Harris voters will have to get past the idea that Trump voters should reap what they have sown. Yes, some of them did vote to burn it all down. But if it all burns down, we burn too. It is not easy to speak right now; but if some Republicans wish to, please listen.